Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it provides employment to people. Most importantly, cooking and eating give us pleasure. …
The link of male homosexuality to q28 gene on the X chromosome was recently reinforced by scientists, exactly 2 years after the first evidence in its favour was produced. After studying a sample of 33 pairs of homosexual brothers, a team led by Stacey Cherny in USA has now reported …
"Learn a lesson from the past, and stop the bombings and the blastings..," said UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali in a message on Hiroshima peace day. "This is an anniversary to remind us what we can do and just how far it is possible for us to go," he declared. …
• The Shiv Sena-BJP bigwigs in Bombay have reintroduced the bill banning the slaughter of cows and calves. The new, "improved" bill calls for an imprisonment increased from 2 years to 5 years and a fine upped from Rs 2,000 to Rs 10,000. • The Cauvery river is to be …
Microsoft Corp, the US software giant, has been given breathing space by the nation's Justice Department. The company, all set to launch its new, much-vaunted operating system, Windows 95 -- which is expected to create a revolution in the world of electronics -- ran into trouble when it decided to …
EVEN as the us pushes itself forward as the patron-in-chief of the nuclear non- proliferation camp, it is going steadily ahead with its nuclear trade transactions. It recently signed a revised treaty with the European Union on the trading of us-origin nuclear fuel, reactors and important reactor parts. The treaty …
WHILE localised prostate cancer is not fatal, its metastatic spread - occurrence or development of secondary foci of cancer at a distance from the primary site - is invariably fatal. Researchers have long been plagued by the question - what dictates molecular changes in metastatic prostate cancer making it life-threatening? …
Alarmed by the sharp depletion of fish stocks, 7 environmental groups, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council of the USA, recently launched a campaign to save the world's large pelagic (open ocean) fishes. Indiscriminate fishing practices, fuelled by burgeoning demands for the high-priced shark oil and other products, are …
THE ongoing controversy in the us involving the Endangered Species Act (Down To Earth, Vol 4, No 5) has taken yet another turn. This time, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has lit the fuse by proposing that the coho salmon should be listed as "threatened" under the Act. The …
American researchers say that a gene believed to be overactive in most types of cancer can be silenced in the mouse by using a stretch of designer DNA. Once the gene has been sabotaged, say researchers led by Yoon Cho-Chung of the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, the …
Scientists at the Research and Technology Department of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in White Oak, Maryland, have produced high quality insulator films on gallium arsenide semiconductors, a concept previously thought to be impossible. The technique could refashion electronics. According to researchers, gallium arsenide is intrinsically a better semiconductor than …
Ancient plants may have been responsible for the disappearance of a number of sea animals which became extinct more than 360 million years ago, say University of Cincinnati (US) researchers Thomas Algeo and his colleagues. The chain of reasoning goes like this::t that point of time, land plants were perfecting …
If you want to look at the world's smallest microscope, using your own eyes may not be enough: you would need another microscope to do that. This microscopic microscope has been developed by Neol McDonald and his students at the Cornell University in the US, and is a scaled-down version …
THERE comes a day when every American president has his shot at immortality. Twenty years ago, in August 1975, Jimmy Carter, one of bullyboy America's rare presidential doormats, desperately wanted an unique event to pump steroids into his image of a gentle, bumbling urpacifist. He also wanted something to immortalise …
Atlantis and Mir did an intimately interlocked fandango for 5 days, and its crew of 6 Americans and 4 Russians sprinted through an impeccably and precisely scheduled series of 28 experiments, 15 of them aboard the Atlantis shuttle: the Atlantis' 60-feet-long bay carried a huge (by spartan extraterrestrial standards) laboratory …
THOMAS Crapper, the inventor of the commode, had never anticipated the headache involved in the act of hitting the pot in space. There has been a steady and gainless drain of US $3 million on R&D; on the no-gravity commode before every blastoff. The Russians, with more on their minds …
Low levels of important nutrients like selenium can turn a benign virus into its virulent form, claim American scientists. Researchers Melinda Beck and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, say that Keshan disease - a fatal virusinduced disease that causes inflammation of the heart muscles …
A US company, T Cell Sciences, has developed a cheaper and easier diagnostic test for people infected with AIDS. Called TFAx CD4, the test measures levels of critical white blood cells, known as CD4 cells, that steadily decline in people with HIV. Current techniques are not only expensive, but can …
A non-polluting hydrogen-powered automobile developed over 14 yews may welk he the vehicle that its inventor Gus Ehrenberg, an engineering graduate from the California Institute of Technology and now an octogenarian, dreamt of. The automobile has potential use as a family vehicle with a range of more than 240 kin …
Interpreting the word "harm" -- used in the Endangered Species Act, 1973 -- in favour of the environmentalist lobby, the US Supreme Court recently upheld an Interior Department regulation to protect species like the northern spotted owl and the red-cockaded woodpecker. The regulation includes destruction of an endangered animal's habitat …
The ingenuity of Tracy Phillips, an 18-year-old senior of Long Beach High in Lido Beach, New York, usa, has ensured that sightless people are no longer bamboozled. Tracy has invented a wallet-sized gadget which reads the number in the corner of a currency bill and announces it over a little …
